Mumbai Slips From 18 to 49 in Swachh Survekshan 2019

Mumbai: While Indore can jubilate in being adjudged the cleanest city for the third year in a row, Mumbai’s rating is a reason for worry. The city slipped to a poor 49 in Swachh Survekshan 2019. That’s a big drop from 18th rank last year.

Thane also slipped 17 positions to end up on 57 even as Navi Mumbai moved up two notches to arrive at number seven. The state of Maharashtra was ranked third among the best-performing states in the cleanliness mission, bagging 45 awards in various categories.

In the category of smaller towns with less than one lakh population, eight of the top 10 were from Maharashtra. Over 50% of the towns in the top 100 are from the state.

Meanwhile, Mumbai’s poor performance is being attributed to a number of reasons; not qualifying for the three-star rating, and poor feedback from citizens being a couple of those. According to a leading daily, Mumbai scored 3,277 marks out of 5,000 this year.

In the certification category, had the city qualified for a three-star rating, it could have scored 750 marks. But, qualifying for two-star rating, it got only 450. The daily pointed out that this happened because the BMC failed to collect user fee from the public to cover the cost of solid waste collection, its transportation, processing and disposal.

In the citizen feedback category, the city got just 848 marks out of 1,250 whereas the last year, it had scored 1,200 out of 1,400 in this category. Citizens said there wasn’t enough information from the BMC about the voting process.

BMC nodal officer from Swachh Bharat Abhiyan Kiran Dighavkar was quoted as saying that the parameters this year were more stringent regarding segregation and processing of waste. “Despite several options for citizens to vote for the city in the competition, it did not happen,” he said.

Meanwhile, two projects of the BMC started in public-private partnership found a mention. The first was the sea-facing solar-powered public toilet at Marine Drive, inaugurated in October 2018. Another project was the citizen-led waste-to-energy plant, in operation in Bandra’s Pali Hill. Under the project, wet waste generates electricity for street lights in Pali Hill.